Seattle – Among the most surreal moments of the past 2 1/2 years for Lani McCool and Rona Ramon, whose husbands died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart, was a recent vacation in the Seattle area.
There were no memorial services or dedications, no speeches to give, no pressure to be a “symbol of strength,” as Ramon said. It was just the two friends, “soul mates,” in their words, sipping bowls of cappuccino, building a campfire in the woods, talking quietly about raising children alone, or not talking at all.
Over dessert one night, Ramon, the widow of Col. Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut in space, turned to McCool, the widow of Cmdr. William C. McCool, the Columbia’s pilot, and said, “They were the best.”
Both Ramon, who moved back to Israel from Houston a year ago, and McCool, who lives in Anacortes, Wash., have struggled with the spotlight since the seven astronauts died on the Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003. That spotlight is intensifying now as NASA prepares to return a shuttle to space Wednesday, and the families find themselves dealing differently with the launching.
McCool, unlike Ramon, plans to travel to Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the launching with one of her three sons, and she is planning to send two mementos on the Discovery shuttle.
One, a collage of photographs she took, has at its center her husband’s charred name tag, the only tag recovered from the wreckage of the Columbia.
The other item she is sending on the Discovery is a ring she and her husband called the “hope ring” because the word is engraved on the outside. She had not taken it off since he gave it to her years ago.
Evelyn Husband, the widow of the shuttle commander, Col. Rick Husband, said of going to the launching, “It’s not a mountain that I need to climb.”
Husband spoke in a telephone interview from Houston, the city where Mission Control is based, and the place where she, along with a few of the other families, has remained.
The families have stayed close.
“Everyone is making their own way to a new life,” Ramon said, “but we all care so much about each other.”
Four spouses of the astronauts – all except Husband and Ramon – and the brother of one astronaut who was not married, Capt. David M. Brown, will attend the launch.